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Introduction

Introduction

Enthusiasm, Event, Literature

Chapter:

(p.1)
Introduction

Source:

Mania for Freedom

Author(s):

John Mac Kilgore

Publisher:

University of North Carolina Press

DOI:10.5149/northcarolina/9781469629728.003.0001

This chapter provides an overview of the book’s historical, political, and literary material. It is broken into three sections. The first section situates “enthusiasm” in relationship to the modern critique of revolution and leveling democracy, specifically the American and French Revolution, through discussions of Edmund Burke and William Blake. The second section argues for enthusiasm’s importance to transnational studies of American literature, histories of American protest and American religion, affect theory, and philosophies of emancipation (or “the event”). The third section defines what the author calls “literatures of enthusiasm” as a convulsive writing of political crisis encouraging acts of dissent and liberation, using Frederick Douglass and Walt Whitman as examples.

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PRINTED FROM UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.northcarolina.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright University of North Carolina Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in NCSO for personal use.date: 07 June 2020